Where the missing middle of housing isn't missing
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
For example:
- You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the neighbors.
- You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors.
- You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your ability to customize your home.
I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes. At least in the current system the middle class and the richer end of the working class can often afford single family homes.
> The view that a human can only have autonomy and dignity through either a workshop or outdoor hobbies is absolutely wild. You should try to understand other people perspectives, interests, and value functions before you proclaim stuff like this.
We live in a relatively low cost of living suburbs of a major metropolitan city - $2200 month mortgage for a 3000 square foot home.
After we got married, I moved from my house that was about the same size in a good neighborhood but horrible school system and moved to an apartment for my (step)children. Between rent going up constantly (went from $1200 to $1700 in 4 years, it’s now $2100 4 years after we moved), noisy neighbors, horrible WiFi and being forced to pay for Comcast, I would never want to live in any type of shared housing.
I'm sorry to hear that your experience has been bad but I'm very happy with my shared housing and there are a lot of people who feel the same way.
It doesn’t matter how fast your Internet is when your WiFi is unusable because all of your neighbors have the same service. We had to run three 100 foot Ethernet cables from my office where the cable modem was to three bedrooms - along the floor. It’s not like we could wire the rooms with Ethernet. I made sure to wire every room in our house. We do have gig e now.
I do understand your larger point about a city's infrastructure accommodating the culture of its inhabitants. Taking LA as an example again, because of the widespread reliance on car commuting in the city, it's harder here to close some streets down to personal vehicle traffic, as has been done in other cities recently.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/services/deliver...
Most or all major furniture stores deliver here. I see delivery trucks from a very large one about 35 minutes away all the time, maybe as much as once a week. Not sure about IKEA, as they're super-weird about that kind of thing (see also: online ordering & shipping). They might, though.
In fact, I've never bought a large appliance and walked out from the store with it. Even if my local store does have the item in stock (sometimes they do; sometimes they don't; the big box stores don't generally keep a large stock of major appliances in-store), it's way more convenient to get the store to do the delivery and install for me-- especially since that's frequently included in the cost for major appliances (or a relatively small extra charge).
I have had appliances (fridges, washing machines, dryers), lumber, etc delivered. I have had a patio window replaced.
It may not be the case with IKEA but that place is even more known for cheapness. I just haven’t tried it with IKEA.
I wouldn't buy an apartment in a multi-family home either though, simply because your money is tied for quite a while and it's essentially a lottery whether you have terrible neighbors or not. If they suck, you can't easily leave.
With a detached single-family home, you'll at least have a few meters and two walls between your neighbors and you, and if they can't sleep and walk about and start to sort their books, it won't keep you awake, researching the perfect crime on Google.
What's somewhat more common in Germany (at least in the rural areas) is having a single small apartment inside a single family home that was usually rented to workers.
There are approx 128.6 million US households so at most 4.2% of US households have someone who considers themselves a woodworker. There are numerous shared wood shops out there, so an even smaller percentage will have home woodshops.
I think the "missing middle" seems like a great option for the 95+% of US households who don't need a wood shop.
edit: I just realized you said "workshop" and not "woodshop" but I don't think it makes a huge difference to my argument.
- There is a detached garage and a basement, so you have workshop options similar to any homeowner's.
- There is a yard (and this is common in most U.S. cities where two-, three-, and four-flats are prevalent).
- Of course you can modify the outside of the house? I'm confused by this objection. You own the home. You can modify its appearance within the bounds of the law, just as you can with a SFH. (Edit: perhaps you're imagining owning a unit in the home and not the home itself? That makes more sense.)
Obviously, it's not exactly like living in a SFH; it's a multi-family building, after all. But I've lived in these kinds of two-flats both as a renter and a homeowner and it's much more like owning (even as a renter) than it is like living in an apartment "complex."
These kinds of buildings are not priced much higher (if at all) than single-family homes and owner-occupied arrangements (meaning the owner of the entire building occupies one unit in the building) are extremely common.
Look, I get it, you prefer a detached dwelling. But all the arguments you're making aren't compelling at all. It really sounds like it comes down to a preference thing for you.
I'm happy with it, but I've realized that all of those things come with downsides as well. Maintaining a yard is rewarding (assuming you like caring for plants and stuff), but also a hassle and a fair amount of work. Similar with all the other items. Of course you can pay people to do more of it, but it's not like that has zero cost, either.
As far as the workshop, I have a friend who does a ton of woodworking out of the garage of his townhouse. It does feel a little bit like luck of the draw with HOA, though.
Generally, I think we talk a lot about the benefits of SFH, but not enough about their downsides, or about the upsides of shared housing. When I lived in an apartment before, tons of things were taken care of for me that I now have to worry about. For now, that is a burden I am interested in taking on, but I think as a society we should stop acting like that should be the default, and all other options are inferior compromises.
The comment elsewhere in this discussion by "enragedcacti" is spot-on: if the law requires everyone to eat black beans, it will seem like everyone strongly prefers black beans.
Are you really arguing that if you asked people many wouldn't state that they would prefer to live in a detached home?
Some people would like the option to save money and buy less housing in an area - see micro apartments. Some people would be willing to spend as much as they can to live in a desirable area, but cannot afford a SFH there so they buy a SFH in a different area. Both of those options are limited by the near omnipresent restrictions on housing types outside of central cities.
In fact, there is strong evidence that at least 2 people in the US prefer SFH when presented with multiple choices: myself, and the person I was replying to. I suspect we are not alone, which you acknowledge elsewhere.
If you want to shift society away from SFH, it might be helpful to engage with some of the reasons people prefer them, and reasons they are wrong. From what I've seen, part of what keeps exclusionary zoning laws in place is that some people think living in multi-family dwellings is inferior to living in SFH[1], and in my comment I was trying to point out the incorrectness of that thinking. I'm confused why you think I shouldn't do so, since it supports your cause. This is just an internet forum where people are talking, so it's not like that precludes other discussion.
By the way, I already upvoted the bean comment, it's a great comment. I think it's okay to talk both about laws and preferences, and their intersection.
[1]: People have made this argument in this very thread, in fact.
The argument is not that no one ever wants to live inside single family home. It is that many people are fine with different housing and dont have such option.
Land had value. You can tear down. SFH and build anything allowed by city code. Want a bigger garage? No problem. New fruit tree out back? Can do.
That flexibility is priced in.
I live in a very large townhome complex much of which is built on top of an underground parking garage. There dozens of townhomes here, intermixed with condos as well.
There isn't any land for me to put a tree on, there is a commonly owned green area (a very nice one!) but people can't plant whatever they want there since it is under common ownership.
I'd say most of the townhome communities around where I am at are arranged like this.
I'm familiar with row houses from traveling to other cities, but I haven't (rarely?) seen anything like that here in the Seattle area.
The latest trend is SFHs built on 3000 sqft lots.
Honestly at that point, a townhome complex with a common yard seems very preferable.
I think you might be surprised.
More supply of a substitute (in this case, townhomes) should result in lowered demand/price of SFHs.
Or do you mean like a terrace home? Like a town-house? Those are super common in many places and it doesn't cause any of the problems you're imagining in my experience.
My house shares one wall with another family. Not sure how you'd tell or what impact you think it'd have. I still have power tools in my garage.
> You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the neighbors.
We hear far more noise from the neighborhood in general than the neighbors we share a wall with. Granted they might just be particularly quiet people, but there is some significant sound-deadening in that wall.
I think this is partly because of fire code that says the wall needs to withstand a 30 minute fire before crossing over into the neighboring unit.
> You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors.
This is perhaps unique to our situation, but the area has never been fully built-out, so we have a 5 acre plot of land that the kids can play on as they please.
Since most of our neighbors never come outside, we actually have an enormous yard that we get basically to ourselves.
> You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your ability to customize your home
This is true to an extent, but there isn't really all that much worth customizing on the outside of a house.
I guess you could pick different colored siding, but that seems like an expense I wouldn't be motivated enough to take on.
> I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes.
Honestly this stigma is something I am benefiting from a ton.
I have 1200 feet of living space, plus an attached 2 car garage, plus a 5 acre yard. I paid $106k for all that. I pay $100 / month to the HOA and get lawn / snow taken care of. It's honestly great.
To get an equivalent standalone house in the area I'd be looking at 2-3x the cost.
Ditto. I never hear a peep from the adjoining townhouses and one of them has a grand piano.
I also share that experience. Unless you are using loud tools or do anything that vibrates heavily while touching walls (sound can travel very far this way) I never hear anything and I'm in a 5 story apartment complex. It's all about having nice and thick sound isolating walls. The worst noise sources all come from the outside.
I love to live in a city. I love to have access to museums, gardens, universities and good public transportation.
My fear is that people may end up killing the city in favor of single-family homes and making owning a car mandatory. That cities that I love like New York, London, Tokyo or Shanghai may disappear and become an endless shapeless blob of single-family homes without identity were people looks suspiciously to anyone that "do not belong to the neighborhood". It would be a loss to humanity to get rid of the creativity, the openness, the heterogeneity of the city. People has gathered in cities as long as civilization has existed. Cities are civilization.
I have lived in London, Barcelona and Stockholm. Great cities on their own, with good public transportation, services, restaurants, that feel safe, alive, and a bridge between past and future. But, your experience may vary depending on the quality of the cities you have lived in.
In what universe is anyone proposing tearing down the buildings in NY, London, Tokyo, or Shanghai and replacing them with SFH? I've seen some articles about new mega-rich construction in London with homes going deep underground, but largely replacing existing townhomes and the like, not lowering density. There are just very few people who would spend enough money to buy up a bunch of units and turn them into a handful of houses...
The only push for active change is the opposite direction: people who want to change the cities with abundant single family homes.
As a result there is less of a drive for people who are in between, or even want to live in the city a bit, to live there and make it a more lively area since it ends up being artificially more expensive.
On top of this, a lot of zoning makes interesting, dense cities straight up illegal or incredibly expensive to build, again, in preference of low density single family homes.
This is what people are concerned with and want to change.
The city also has the highest wage tax in the nation >4%, more than half of which is still due if you commute in. Unsurprisingly, these suburban commuters represent a huge line item in the city's revenue - that is gone if everyone is WFH. City schools also receive the bulk of their funding from the state, unlike suburban schools which are paid mostly out of local taxes.
In the Philly area at least, the city would never survive without its rich suburbs.
Maybe not "torn down", there was definitely a period of time in the US where urban areas were being abandoned for the suburbs.
COVID-19 will kill megacities. Whether they'll all be torn down and replaced with single-family dwellings or just left to rot into slums is indeterminate, but they're going to go away one way or the other.
Cities over a certain size are only viable if they have an effective public transport network, and public transit isn't compatible with endemic COVID-19. Get one superspreader on one train car and you now have 250 infected people and multiple deaths. Even the vaccines that are currently under development would only reduce the carnage to 125, rather than 250, people. No one is going to accept this risk if they have a choice, which is why public transit ridership has cratered everywhere.
Remove public transit from the picture and you have a car dependent city. By definition car dependent cities must have a low density to keep traffic congestion barely manageable. Highrise multifamily is no longer possible, nor are high rise offices. SFH with suburban office parks are the only style of building that makes sense when everyone must drive.
Further, everyone who can is shifting to WFH, which will erode the importance of cities as a concept. Get good Internet into the rural areas and most white collar workers will live there just to reduce the risk of dying from COVID.
When, in a few decades, we eventually get COVID-19 vaccines and treatments good enough to go back to the way things were, the changes to how we live will be socially baked-in and it will be too late to walk them back.
Cities are over.
My partner is from Victoria and we’ve eyed places out there on a whim but even up island doesn’t seem to be big savings. Maybe a bit more bang for the buck than out here in Ontario.
I took a look at Victoria rentals when I was interviewing for a job out there, but ended up realizing that there is less selection, less availability, and less public infrastructure that would otherwise make it a worthwhile move. I love the island generally speaking, if I have access to a car, and am hoping to do some backcountry camping out there soon, but it doesn't suit me as more of an urbanite at this time. In my current neighborhood, I can get downtown without a car in about 25 minutes, and my neighborhood is very laid back with tons of greenery and small shops.
What I've heard about the suburbs of Toronto, are that it's a long-ass commute into the city proper, comparatively expensive, and with less access to nature, but perhaps easier access to Montreal, Ottawa, and Buffalo, but I haven't talked to anyone about the specifics of price/amenities. What has your experience been?
I’ve always loved just outside of downtown—“Toronto proper”.
I’m not sure if the burbs have any easier route to those other locales as you still have to take the same highway routes out.
I’ve worked with people who’ve commuted and none of them like the ride. It’s also often at least an hour from the suburbs into central TO if you’re taking transit. They are very spread out and mostly flat save for a few nicer regions. Parking lots, strip malls, and housing developments. Probably a lot more to unpack there. But I’ve never lived out there—just generally glad I didn’t whenever I’d visited either from the city or from my old hometown.
I’m from a very small town and I’m used to the quiet life but I personally couldn’t move to the burbs here. We’re still trying to figure out a balance—where we can find or keep work but get out of the city. But until we can afford or find something ideal or near-ideal the trade offs aren’t worth it. Kind of like yourself. With house prices racing upwards though it feels a bit like a race against time before we’re shut out forever.
This is the world right now, except that many are "stuck" not in multi-family, but instead are precariously housed, or not housed at all: https://www.evictedbook.com/
The big missing factor in your analysis is cost. Someone who might be able to afford a $200K home might not be able to at $400K. The goal is to give people a diversity of options. https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-bui...
Strongtowns has this blindness about how most Americans live. Look at this quote:
>you’d see higher-end restaurants, organic groceries, day care facilities, hardware stores, boutiques or bakeries or doctor's offices, depending on the mix of residents nearby.
Yeah obviously if you're well off it's awesome to live in walking distance to these things. But most people aren't. And the suburban home where you drive to a grocery store is a way cheaper life than living in Madison
And it isn't a lack of space to build, Sweden is less population dense than USA. Lots of people still live away from things in detached houses, those doesn't disappear just because we give others the option to not live like that. And you know, thanks to most people living in denser areas most things aren't that far away from the detached homes either, they benefit from density too.
Also, I don't think the parent post by harimau777 was comparing specifically with suburban single family houses. A like-with-like comparison in the same or similar neighborhoods seems more appropriate. I was more addressing his statement that "only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes", pointing out that for many, multi-family homes are preferable to single family houses.
Finally, to your point of living within walking distance to various shops and services. Sure, high end shopss will congregate near high-income neighborhoods, but high density neighborhoods will attract businesses even if the residents are not wealthy, due to the density driving sufficient volumes to the businesses. Thus it's likely more a matter of whether zoning allows mixed use.
Townhomes/condos with an HOA are a different beast. That's a function of the ownership structure (SFH vs. condo vs. TIC vs. apartment) rather than the physical dwelling, though. At least in the Bay Area, it's not uncommon to find SFHs that have been converted into multi-family properties with the addition of an in-law unit or ADU. The vast majority of these use a traditional landlord/tenant relationship.
I have a garden at home, and I love it, but I miss my old apartment where I had to rent a community garden plot, and therefore got to know the community while I gardened. If I live in a co-op housing project and I'm a bit older and can't do repair work on my house, I have a neighbor who can do that for me. If I want a wood shop but wouldn't be able to afford a house big enough to build one even if I can afford to buy my own house, I can get together with a bunch of other people in my community and build that too, pooling resources and owning it jointly. If the internet options in my neighborhood are terrible (ie. I live in a place where my options are AT&T which goes out once a day and wants to charge me $100 before they'll even talk to me about it or Spectrum where I've gotten literally half of the advertised speed and just been told "sorry, our copper isn't very good in that area"), then the tech-knowledgeable neighbors can spin up a local wireless ISP and we can all share a bit of bandwidth depending on what we can chip in and have more reliable, faster, internet for everyone, etc. All of this makes me get to know the people in those communities, fostering neighborly cooperation and understanding. This is why any business I ever start will be a co-op, collective, or some similar model: everyone gets what they want cheaper than if they do it individually, and it builds community at the same time.
I sometimes think that the richer you are the harder it is to build real community because no one has to work together towards a common goal. Most (not all, of course) of the rich people I know if they host a party will have the single house that's hosting grill/buy beer and get catering and don't know their neighbors very well (or at all, in most cases). In a community I used to be a part of where most people weren't as privileged as me and didn't have great tech jobs, we'd all get together and throw a pot luck, each person contributing what they could and everyone knew each other because we'd had to work so much more closely to make the event happen.
TL;DR support your local co-ops and the co-op economy. Democratically run community owned businesses are hard, but well worth the effort.
That's what we have now. Either you pay for the full detached single-family experience or you are in a high-rise with no autonomy. You don't have the option of with slightly less autonomy than a detached house but more than a high-rise for a lower price that you can get with townhouses or duplexes.
Not sure if that's a great example.
My aunt owned a home in Ann Arbor that she paid $45,000 for. Over the next 20 years, almost every other home around her turned into a rental units for students. Landlords made tons of money, who could blame them.
She was older and didn't like living in between parties and chaos, and let's not even get into Saturdays during football season.
She did sell the house for almost nine times what she paid for it, though. There's no more empty land there, and hasn't been in forever, so what do you do.
The neighborhoods makeup and appearance is very close to UW, you could swap the buildings in the article and never know the difference.
Don't the students get together in little groups of four to six and rent a family home? That's what they do in the UK.
The problem is when we do:
- the quality is absolutely atrocious
- they're so extremely small that they hardly seem livable when you look around
- they have terrible gardens with hardly any soil
- frankly, they're really ugly - simple cubes, no shape or space or nooks and crannies
- they're in terrible areas and have no walkable shops or pubs
I don't think I'd ever consider buying a house built after 1950. I worry we're building disposable, treeless, joyless, community-less slums.
The quality of new houses is obviously much better, as I now realize having lived in both (sure, it looks good on the surface until you actually live in it and try to make modifications or run into issues). Plaster, old wiring, wooden windows, hardwood etc. really suck compared to drywall, plastic, laminate, etc. The only old houses I saw with good quality are the ones that were gutted out and redone with new stuff. Thank god this one was almost entirely rewired, if the entire house was as bad as a few places with old wiring, I would have definitely moved out.
The garden is a huge hassle. I waste 30-60 minutes a week on it and it still mostly looks like crap, I am not going to spend any more time and not going to pay anyone on principle to make it look better - it's like spending money to buy a Porsche to park it in your driveway for display, pointless. Next time I'd opt for less garden.
It has slanted roof (in place with minimal snowfall) - colossal waste, I cannot finish the attic because it would only be livable for gnomes, I've seen finished attics like that; I cannot go on the roof to enjoy the views - I wish it was shaped like a cube! Slanted roofs are 100% pointless unless you have massive snowfall. The only reason to not want a house shaped like a cube is sentimental attachment.
All the nooks and crannies waste a ton of space (speaking of small), it's ~15% bigger on paper than our last apartment but lives much smaller.
It's in a great area, but because of all the sprawling gardens it's quite a walk to a pub or a shop - compared to your average dense townhouse development.
But I don't agree about the garden or shape - I think green space and architecture has a scientifically documented positive impact on well-being - I don't think comparing them to a luxury for show is really sensible.
I think around the 30s is probably perfect - houses still made of solid brick and stone, with thick internal walls to create sound privacy, and high-quality solid materials that will last centuries. But still made with basically modern technology and not containing any surprises.
Equity based cooperatives and land trusts should be getting more attention in Boulder, since both have solid track records of providing permanently affordable housing elsewhere. Instead, local activists are following the national trend of pushing measures designed to facilitate the large scale transfer of private property into corporate rental portfolios.
Creating a retirement community just falls into the umbrella of creating a dedicated subdivision for people like her though. There's probably not much demand for that in college towns?
What is it doing here?
It's a magazine, not a peer-reviewed journal.
Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes a casual conversation about issues without a reproducible study is ok.
Some of us want to live, not just code. We care about how we live, not just what we write.
Mind you, I myself don't find these strongtowns articles particularly compelling. But enough people do for them to "keep showing up on HN". And I'm not going to say that those who find them interesting are wrong.
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
You may be a "good hacker", but you're not the only one. Enough people here find this stuff interesting that it's within the purpose of the site.
They are a bit like Zerohedge constantly talking about the economy imploding...soon.
It's not limited to just wealthy here either. Almost every considers how something will "affect their property values." Oh, and it's not even like people use studies to determine how property values are effected. They literally just make shit up in their head, and if they think it will drive down property values, it's a veto.
It's why things in the USA are the way they are. Anything not SFHs with big yards and 3 car garages are "bad for property values."
If you do a multi-family home, you can easily build up to 8 town houses or largish apartments on that same area. Say you sell each of these for 500k, leaving the family a good argument to move into this more dense configuration. Even if the construction costs stay the same (they won't), that would leave you with 1.6M for the whole real estate.
I'd encourage anyone who cares about these issues to vote, to contact local politicians, to attend local debates or city council meetings.
From my perspective as a free range kid in the 2000s, by far the most dangerous was crossing the 40 mph streets into other neighbourhood and getting a threat to call the police just because I briefly cycled in the neighbor's backyard.
In that era, I would want less dangerous streets to cross and actual interconnected bike trails.
Like food, you need housing to survive. housing will be built and purchased because it's necessary, even if legislation mandates a type of housing that isn't well suited to the population.
> The legislation followed popular opinion.
Agreed. The legislation followed the popular opinion that black people were inferior and dangerous and needed to be priced out of white neighborhoods through draconian zoning laws.
* Things to explore and do by yourself
* Lots of other kids to do these things with
But I don't know. I'm not a parent. I wonder if there are studies that show what happens. For what it's worth, this could just be personal bias. I grew up separately in the country when I was very young and then in a Barcelona-style superblock when I was a teenager, and enjoyed both experiences.
This connection (between redlining and modern Single-family-house-only zoning districts) is the topic of the recommended book. It's difficult to give a high-quality summary of the book.
An NPR story with the author of the book might be a better introduction than anything I could write:
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/17/528822128/the-color-of-law-de...
For example, absurdly high minimum lot sizes and low coverage ordinances were designed to keep cheaper and denser units from being built as a roundabout way to keep POC from desirable neighborhoods. These ordinances remain on the books today, and much of the Bay Area and its insane housing policies is connected to this.
It is complicated, because distance to school, childcare and to work makes massive difference in child raising too. The distance to friends makes difference between "parent needs to drive the kid for each playdate" vs "the kid walks to play with the friend".
This all may mean that kids in flat are easier practically while kids in single family home mean the parent spends all the time driving them around.